Wenfei Xu
Wenfei Xu's research questions how housing policies, practices, institutions, and technologies have shaped urban inequality, with an orientation toward methods in urban analytics. She works on topics in social-spatial stratification, segregation, race and ethnicity, data science, mapping, and neighborhood change in the United States. Her work has ranged from an interest in the historical legacies of structural housing discrimination and its contemporary spatial-temporal manifestations to exploring the uses of big data in characterizing human activity for urban social science research.
Xu received her Ph.D. in urban planning from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, a Dual Master in Architecture and Urban Planning from MIT's Department of Architecture and Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Chicago.
"Born from an awareness of societal inequalities and a belief in the transformative power of analysis and communication, my commitment to scholarship deepened through my experiences as a data scientist in the tech sector and public administration."
Academic Research/Specialty Areas
- Housing
- Planning history
- Mapping
- Neighborhood change
- Segregation
- Urban data science
Related Links
Related News
- Expansive New Study Finds Racial Bias in Chicago Traffic Stops
- Developing a Digital Twin for Climate Adaptation in New York City
- Adapting to Multiple and Cascading Climate Change Hazards in New York City
- Russell Sage Foundation Grant to Support Housing Policy Research
- Cornell AAP Announces Eight New Faculty Members, Including Cross-Disciplinary Social Justice Cohort
Awards, Grants, and Fellowships (Selected)
- Winner, IPUMS Annual Research Awards, Best Published Work in Spatial Data (2022)
- Postdoctoral Fellowship, Mansueto Institute and Center for Spatial Data Science (2021)
- Small Research Grant on Racial Justice, American Association of Geographers Digital Geographies Specialty Group (2021)
Exhibitions and Presentations (Selected)
- "The Contingency of Neighborhood Diversity: Variation of Social Context Using Mobile Phone Location Data", Spatial Analysis + Data Seminar Series, Newcastle University, University of Bristol and The Alan Turing Institute (2022)
- "Regional Heterogeneity and the Uneven Distribution of Advantage in Historical Federal Mortgage Insurance Outcomes", Urban Affairs Association, Washington, D.C. (2022)
Publications (Selected)
- Xu, Wenfei. "Legacies of Institutionalized Redlining: A Comparison Between Speculative and Implemented Mortgage Risk Maps in Chicago, Illinois." Housing Policy Debate 32, no. 2 (2022), 249–274.
- Xu, Wenfei. "The contingency of neighbourhood diversity: Variation of social context using mobile phone application data." Urban Studies 59, no. 4 (2021), 851–869.
- Kang, Wei, Taylor Oshan, Levi J. Wolf, Geoff Boeing, Vanessa Frias-Martinez, Song Gao, Ate Poorthuis, and Wenfei Xu. "A roundtable discussion: Defining urban data science." Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 46, no. 9 (2019), 1756–1768.
- Williams, Sarah, Wenfei Xu, Shin B. Tan, Michael J. Foster, and Changping Chen. "Ghost cities of China: Identifying urban vacancy through social media data." Cities 94 (2019), 275–285.
